As many people know I had a difficult situation in late Summer 2017. My wife died. This placed a lot of new pressures on me besides all the emotional issues associated with a sudden and unexpected loss. As such things have been a bit quiet on the Open Source "front" for me. I actually shutdown my servers as I really had not extra cycles personally to apply to the various projects I had been working.

I am slowly getting things back in order. I some more work to do before I reboot the servers but I do believe that will happen in the next month or so. I have some other commitments I need to address first - I run the South Carolina FIRST Tech Challenge program and we just had the State Championship event about 10 days ago - so that is behind me. I am going to be judging at the South Super-Regional event in Athens, Georgia in late March and have a "FunFest" event in Greenville on 1 April... So, it is not like I am sitting on my hands...

I also have some medical issues to tend to. Nothing serious, although painful, just aggravating.

So check back... Or better yet join us on the monthly conference calls dealing with technical issues and progress in the Open Source on OpenVMS community.

We have been able to get SMBD to work under the TCPIP Aux Server environment - multiple server processes - automatically - and access from multiple clients simultaneously. So now the next challenge is to reduce the number of shared images so we can then have SMBD and NMBD run with minimal impact on a server - reduce or minimize sysgen parameter changes.

Then the testing and debugging will continue more evenly as we move forward.

Need to find, isolate and fix a bug a day for a while. Not too much issue finding. The isolation is a bit more of a challenge as well as getting a fix in a day.

Also need to start developing the new VMS specific ACL code.

Also utilities need to checked out and tested.

No attempt will be made to get the Python extension working - at least not on first blush.

And I need to start working on a paper about this port for the OpenVMS Boot Camp being held in late September in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Now this has all been in "single" process mode. But it is definite progress!

Currently we are working on getting this version of Samba (4.3.6) to running under the HPE TCPIP Auxilury Server (this is similar to the inetd environment of Linux/Unix). Various issues have to be addressed, the invocation under the AUX server does not use stdin as its base socket, but relies upon the server to create a socket with a special "protocol family" type - TCPIP$C_AUXS. There are also issues with the code as it has come to us in that it does not like doing the DEBUG logging in this mode until after a certain point - which we still have to isolate, document and resolve.

Have been able to get the code to a point where I can navigate the folders in a share and also open and display a file. Yes, progress.

And then I tried to create a file... Oops! Well, not really surprising that code path has not been excised yet and many issued need to be checked. Looks like an issue with some of the talloc code possibly - that was the comment in the log file. So will dive into that soon.

Nice to see the progress and get the reward of seeing the navigation and the display.